BrainStorm
Got ideas for cool new things Global Voices should be doing? Suggestions for new tools, new projects, or ways to make the blog, wiki, and aggregator more useful to people? New community-building ideas? Please add them below. Be sure to log in before you do so, so that we know who you are. Thanks! ---Rebecca ---- Collectors and funnels Bopuc 18:08, 18 Aug 2005 (EDT) In an effort to streamline a workflow and a set of tools for our Regional Editors, I've started thinking about a simple system of "Collectors and Funnels", or "Collecting pools and canals", to use an irrigation metaphor. The idea, again, is essentially to slightly formalize-but not in any way restrict to-a set of resources and thus ways of collecting bits of information for eventual candidature to publication. The actors in this scenario are: the public at large who wish to alert GVO to items of possible interest (this can be anyone, total stranger or EthanZ... ;), the regional editors who try to keep an eye on their territories and the content that comes from them, and the GVO site editors (? or main bloggers? not entirely familiar with your structure). Collectors Collectors are any RSS generating sources where the public can contribute content (a link, text, an image, a video, a sound) and somehow mark it/tag it. Examples of collectors include: * http://del.icio.us/tag/globalvoices+sudan * http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/middleeast+globalvoices * http://www.flickr.com/photos/search/tags:africa%2Csudan/tagmode:all/ (Flickr doesn't currently offer easy tag intersection browsing, or RSS feeds for searches... go figure. ) (for the moment these three cliché example are all we have but in the future...) GlobalVoices Flickr tagging Hi everyone... Since Paul and others have been really great about posting flickr photos to the site, I wanted to suggest that those of us who post photos to flickr to start tagging relevant photos as globalvoices. For example, I started to tag photos this way recently, so you can see them in this flickr tag collection. And because there's an RSS feed for this tag, we could easily set up an automated photo album on the site that displays new photos posted to flickr using that tag. Anyway, it's just an idea... -andy Hi Andy! Using a flickr tag to flag pictures you would like to bring to the attention of the GVO editors is of course a good idea and useful. The problem with automatic republishing however is the fact that anyone can tag anything as GVO and thus spam our site. All it takes is one tasteless photo... :\ Moving forward, we are definitely going to use more aggregators and aggregation methods, tags included. We do however need to keep some editorial control... give it that human touch. :) I believe we already using del.icio.us tags in a similar way (to solicit content suggestions from anyone and everyone): http://del.icio.us/tag/globalvoices It would be a great idea to make sure we have a "presence" on any and all such systems, worldwide, so people can flag stuff for us on their various systems. This will require an infrastructure of aggregators ... hrmmm... or better, our own del.icio.us clone with i18n support (multilingual)... - BorisAnthony Think about using Esperanto Many of the ideas that underlie Global Voices have been in play for a long time in the Esperanto community. As a start, it might be good to build an Esperanto bridge blog. There are several blogs in Esperantio that are rather like Global Voices already: http://raporto.info/ and http://e-planedo.kerno.org/ . I would also urge you to consider using Esperanto as a bridge language rather than English. Global Voices is clearly all about giving voice to the perifery and helping them be heard in the center. And trying to break down that center-perifery distinction. But using English simply reinforces that very distinction. It increases the value of the center at the expense of the perifery and undermines your stated goals. The goal of Esperanto has always been to provide a neutral means for intercomprehension that doesn't impose special burdens on some peoples while giving special advantages to others. The use of English as an international language can be constructed as a form of imperialism, allowing the richest countries to shift the burden of language learning (and the costs and difficulties of operating in a second language) onto everyone else (see Phillipson's Linguistic Imperialism). ---- It's an excellent suggestion, Steve. I think part of the issue for us is that none of us speak or read Esperanto. We have a tendency to believe that there are more people bilingual in their native languages and English than in those languages and Esperanto, but perhaps we're misguided in that belief. I'd be very interested in seeing someone do roundups of the Esperanto blogosphere and try to build some bridges between that community and the community we're building here. As for the bigger question of whether GV should become an Esperanto project... that's a much bigger question. EthanZ 08:49, 11 Aug 2005 (EDT) ---- I very much appreciate your willingness to consider Esperanto. And, of course, you're absolutely right that there are a lot more people who speak English than Esperanto. Let me use an analogy (that is likely only semi-apt). Imagine a street with a fancy, upscale restaurant-and-bar on one side and a soup-kitchen on the other. Once you get in the door of the bar, there is a terrific and immense buffet (although the international food tends to be only so-so). To get into the bar you either have to buy a pricey membership or have inherited one from your parents. I, like a lot of the people in the bar, inherited my membership and have never had to pay a cent to get in. Moreover, if you've inherited a membership everything is all-you-can-eat for free. Everyone else has to pay a hefty price by the plate. Across the street, the soup kitchen is serviceable and clean -- it has a dedicated staff and everything necessary for good nutrition, but the food tends to be simple fare and there's a lot less variety. It costs a lot less (about a quarter as much) to get into the soup kitchen, but the cost is pretty much the same for everyone. And once inside, there is a small price for each serving but, again, the price for everyone is the same. You and I are sitting in the fancy bar talking about fitting out and decorating a special "charity dining room" that will have a buffet of international food. I say, "You know. Maybe we should do this in the soup kitchen across the street because then people won't have to pay as much to get in and everyone will pay the same." You say, "Yeah, but we're already members here and none of us has never even been in the soup kitchen before. And there are a lot more people in here than in there." I say, "Sure. But there are even more people on the street who are in neither place. A lot of them will have difficulty paying the cover here and, in fact, *most* will never be able to pay that much. And if anyone is going to have to pay, who should it be? Those of us who already have a free ride here ought to be willing at least to pay the same as everyone else. Especially if the total cost is lower." Of course, we're mostly not willing. If a person who speaks three languages is trilingual and if a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, what do you call a person who speaks one language? An American, of course. The other issue is that for people who are willing and able to pay (at all), they're ready to pay the full price. Since there are a lot of people willing to pay full price, it's easy for us to rationalize getting off easy. StevenBrewer 21:47, 11 Aug 2005 (EDT) ---- I support the view that a truly international community that seeks to give a voice to the voiceless should not be insensitive to language issues: English is expensive in time and money, for all of us who doesn't speak it from birth. So is any other language, except Esperanto, which is at least four times easier to learn and truly international. I learnt English because I had to, and I paid for it dearly with years of study, and I still find myself struggling to communicate in it and making all kinds of mistakes. I feel using Esperanto I communicate more freely, more openly, more neutrally, without the baggage of national stuff that lay behind any national language such as English. I would like to see Global Voices in Esperanto, not necessarily as a replacement for the English part, but at least as an alternative. Roberto Perez-Franco 18:57, 23 Aug 2005 (Panama Time) GV Latino --Oso 10:15, 10 Dec 2005 (EST) I'm going to create a new page which will be in Spanish to discuss the possibility of making a Spanish version of Global Voices. GV Latino GV Style Guide brainstorming